From what I gather, a lot of artists make the bulk of their income from concert tickets and merchandise, as a large slice of the income from music sales goes to a label.
Two suggestions:
- Make it real easy for artists to sell merchandise through the site. E.g they just upload a couple of logo's and you deal with printing T-shirts, mailing them etc...
- Organising concerts. You could take a cue from Kickstarter and have a system where the fans of an artist commit to going to see them play. Once say, 50 people have committed, the gig goes ahead.
In both the above scenarios you handle all of payments, naturally taking your cut.
As a touring (folk!) musician, here's what I'd love to add to the platforms that BandCamp and CD baby already provide;
1. A salesforce for managing fan and venue relationships; I'd love it to be easier to build simple lists of invitations for events by location. Facebook events on their own don't cut it.
It would also be great to have some simple reminders and calendaring with mapping integration to manage booking. When did I last nag that venue? Who from our band is available on that day? What other venues are within 300 km?
2. Digital autographs! Autographs are kinda lame - but people still like them, and it makes a connection. I'd love to be able to write something on a piece of paper, snap a photo of it with my iphone, and have an app extract the message and signature - then put it on top of a promo photo before sending it to someone in a form they can use on their facebook page (ideally with links back to our band page).
3. An online platform for music lessons. Many musicians now make an income from remote instrument lessons via skype - especially in niche music categories. Skype and google chat and so on all optimise audio codecs for speech - not music, so there's one thing that could be different. But how useful would it also be to have a collabedit-like guitar, mandolin, violin, piano .. etc? The teacher could share hints and notes with the student. The teacher might also be able to select from some pre-saved sets of tunes or songs, or chord charts and so on.
If Pud just started out with one high margin product (T-Shirts?), and focused on getting a really good system in place to print/sell/ship them it could make a ton of money.
The issue he will have though is inventory management. T-shirts have a (sort of) high fixed cost and you have to sell a bunch of shirts to break even. He would need to collect a deposit from the bands to make sure they were in it to sell the merchandise.
Two suggestions:
- Make it real easy for artists to sell merchandise through the site. E.g they just upload a couple of logo's and you deal with printing T-shirts, mailing them etc...
- Organising concerts. You could take a cue from Kickstarter and have a system where the fans of an artist commit to going to see them play. Once say, 50 people have committed, the gig goes ahead.
In both the above scenarios you handle all of payments, naturally taking your cut.